Get Speed-Booting with an Open BIOS

An anonymous reader writes to mention that IBM Developer Works has a quick look at some of the different projects that are working on replacing proprietary BIOS systems with streamlined code that can load a Linux kernel much faster. Most of the existing BIOS systems tend to have a lot of legacy support built in for various things, and projects like LinuxBIOS and OpenBIOS are working to trim the fat.

Comments

Benefits from experience

[vil3nr0b]

I have repaired clusters for the last two years and most have OpenBios. These are the likes: 1)Fast as hell!! 2)Easy to change options 3)Can mount the file to a disk, edit, and then replace. 4)Errors can be determined by watching console, No video needed. One serial cable, One laptop=priceless. 5)Free

Re:Flash drives

[Cyberax]

I work with embedded systems, and my MIPS-based 166MHz board boots Linux in about 5 seconds, kernel loading starts almost immediately after power on.

I always wanted to have the same capability for my notebook. Sigh...

Re:What about Abstraction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it more important for the BIOS to present an efficient abstraction of certain hardware resources that *any* OS can easily communicate with according to a standard interface than to optimize support, possibly at the expense of flexibility and abstraction, for a single OS (even if that OS is Linux)?

These guys are simply taking advantage of the fact that the BIOS is an unusably bad abstraction. Linux doesn't make BIOS calls, nor does Windows (since before Windows 2000). If you're booting Linux and XP, your BIOS is doing a bunch of slow hardware autodetection, and then passing the baton to your kernel, which ignores that and does its own faster and more reliable hardware detection.

In that sense, if you really want the BIOS abstraction layer, the first step would be to write a reliable one. Putting Linux in there is the logical first step. If you want to hack LinuxBIOS to do the full hardware autodetection, and then hack Linux to trust hardware info from LinuxBIOS, you're welcome to do so (though the benefits are unclear).

We broke this abstraction in Linux for reliability, not performance. If somebody wants to remove some useless old cruft to increase performance for free, I have no problem with that.

Re:Deck chairs on the Titanic

[Karellen]

It seems to me that it would be worth the trouble to mechanize startup so that each step is isolated from all the others and knows which previous step it's dependent on and waits for only that step, while everything else cruises ahead in parallel.

We're working on it...

Re:What about Abstraction?

[billcopc]

You, like many others before you, are confusing BIOS with what was once called "CMOS Setup".

The BIOS is essentially a set of low-level device drivers for the motherboard and basic peripherals (keyboard, display). Overclockers don't care about it, as long as it works.

The "CMOS Setup", or more appropriately System Setup, is an interface to configure the motherboard's features. The fancier ones offer many tweaking options, some even have a minimal Linux OS like the Asus P5K3 Deluxe (extremely handy for pre-boot stuff - or web/media browsing). Overclockers love big feature-rich control panel on their board as they allow them to tweak their system to further heights, and offer added functionality like built-in flashing (from a USB key or hard drive) and "smart" overclocking which is like the opposite of Intel Speedstep :)